Conventional social networks (such as Facebook® and LinkedIn®) provide a variety of features, sometimes free of charge and often on a “freemium” model, to attract users to their site, but almost all of the social network platform providers retain a level of control on user content which may compromise a user's privacy. In an attempt to commercially monetize data extracted from the user's interaction on their sites, the platform providers make the data available to advertisement services/retailers/wholesalers. Currently, users almost have no choice to enjoy the social networking experience without having to endure undesirable exposure to advertisement and/or breach of privacy, resulting in a lot of potential users avoiding social networking altogether. This shortcoming may actually hurt businesses who would want to reach out to potential customers in a meaningful way where the user's attention is not diluted by an overwhelming amount of un-curated data.
Furthermore, a user has to log on separately to various social networks to interact on a particular platform with a particular group of people. Often, user has no flexibility in aggregating contents from various networks as personal bookmarking/archival. The users are also not empowered to create ‘groups’ according to their preference to enjoy focused and perhaps higher-quality interaction within a group with a level of privacy that the user is comfortable with.
To address many of the shortcomings discussed above, what is needed is a social networking platform with customizable level of privacy and enhanced features to empower the users to control the flow of data that they share. In many aspects, what is needed is an antidote to the conventional social networking experience.